An article in a summertime issue of Time magazine began with this interesting little story: “Growing up in Appalachia in the 1950s, Brent Kennedy always believed that he was of English and Scotch-Irish descent, just like everyone he knew in his hometown of Wise, Virginia. But when he saw the film Lawrence of Arabia in 1962, he noticed that his family looked more like the Arabs in the movie than the British. Kennedy had inherited his father’s light blue eyes, but he had his mother’s black hair and in the summer would get a deep tan. He had heard a story about his great-grandfather being barred from voting in the early 1900s because his skin was too dark. ‘I thought, what’s wrong with us? Why do we look funny?’ When he asked his mother, ‘I was told to shut up. I really didn’t know who I was,’ he says. Last December he finally got some answers. After taking a $199 DNA test…Kennedy was told he was 45% Northern and Western European, 25% Middle Eastern, 25% Turkish-Greek and 5% South Asian.” It was the DNA test, Kennedy says, that “unlocked the mystery of his ancestry.”ⁱ

Do you know who you are? Do you know the particular racial and ethnic recipe that God stirred up in his heavenly mixing bowl before he popped you in the oven? And even if you did know, with all the certainty that scientific DNA testing can produce, would that tell you who you really are? And does your ancestry have much to do with what you are doing here anyway? Presumably, all of us trace our ancestry back into the dimly lit caves of Africa where somewhere we Homo sapiens first started acting worthy of that name, and so we’re all related anyway. Why were we made to be who we are? The biographer and essayist Andre Maurois concluded that, “The universe is indifferent. Who created it? Why are we here on this puny mud-heap spinning in infinite space? I have not the slightest idea, and I am quite convinced that no one has the least idea.”

We all want to know who we are. We all want to know what we are doing here. We all want to know why things are the way they are, and we want to know how things are supposed to be, and we want to know the reason behind it all. These are questions that bubble just beneath the surface of our lives all the time, and when life itself erupts into confusion or tragedy, as it did four years ago in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, and as it did nearly two weeks ago on the Gulf Coast, the questions take on an urgency that cannot be ignored.

If you want to shop around for answers to these questions you will find no shortage of philosophies, theories, and world-views from which you can choose. Generally speaking, it seems you can lump them all into several main categories. There are those who say we simply do not have the slightest idea who we are or what we’re doing here, and that we can never know. There are those who say that whatever meaning there is is meaning that we create for ourselves, and that is good enough. These self-made systems range all the way from noble sentiments infused with love and honor and family, to rather more realistic notions characterized by getting as much as you can and enjoying as much as you can for as long as you can before the party ends. And then there are those—ourselves included—who believe that meaning can be found and that this meaning is found with reference to something outside ourselves, namely, God.

The story is told about a colleague who once stumbled upon the famously agnostic actor W. C. Fields in his dressing room and he was reading the Bible. Fields was startled, too, and embarrassed, and he snapped his Bible shut and said, “Just looking for loopholes.”ⁱⁱ

You and I believe and our experience confirms that the Bible has the most reliable information about the most important questions, and we don’t want loopholes, we want the truth. Last week we began to read from the Bible in Paul’s pivotal letter to the Christian folks in Ephesus, a letter that many believe Paul actually intended not just for the Ephesians, but for Christians everywhere. We focused on two words from the first two sentences of Paul’s letter: grace and peace. Peace is what we want, or in another way of saying it, the good life is what we want. We want to have the best kind of life possible, and that includes a life that is informed by some sense of our purpose and place in it. Peace is what we get, scripture affirms, because God wants us to have it and in fact God has made it possible for us to have it even though we cannot earn it. God wants to give us the best possible life we can have, and that is what we call “grace.” And so as we read Ephesians together, what we are really doing is learning about living the good life, which we can do only as we “live a God life,” a life that takes its cues from God. Who we are and what we are here for and what life is all about is inextricably tied to God.

Grace is given to you and therefore peace is available to you, Paul declares at the very beginning, and then he goes on to explain in glorious terms what grace and peace are all about. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.” Paul gets so excited about the blessings that God has already given us that he can’t stop himself, and in one long sentence that runs for 11 verses in our English translations, he waxes eloquent about the amazing truths of our existence that God himself has instituted in the very fabric of our existence. God destined us for adoption. God redeemed us and forgave us. God lavished his riches upon us and shared inside knowledge about the mystery of his will. God chose us.

Any one of these amazing affirmations is worthy of our attention, but let’s focus on what it means to be chosen. About 14 times a day we get a phone call at home from some mortgage company that informs us that since the Baca family has such a stellar record making our payments, we are eligible to participate in a refinancing plan. We have been chosen! The only problem is, the Baca family doesn’t have a mortgage because this church owns the house we live in! That’s not the kind of “chosen” that Paul is talking about. How many of you remember when you were a kid, and it came time to choose up sides for the baseball team? How many of you remember when you were a teenager, and that cute boy walked across the gym floor to the side where all the girls were standing, waiting to be asked to dance? It feels really good to be chosen to play on the team, doesn’t it? And it feels really good to be chosen to dance, doesn’t it? That’s the kind of choosing that God does as he chooses us for something far better than baseball or dancing.

God chooses to bless us, and not just with one blessing, but with blessings too many to count. I grew up going to a summer camp meeting in the mountains of New Mexico, the dry, dusty, mountains of New Mexico. At that camp meeting we sang the old hymns, and the one that came to mind as I studied this passage was this one: “There shall be showers of blessings, this is the promise of love, there shall be seasons refreshing, sent from the Savior above. Showers of blessing, showers of blessing we need: mercy drops round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Without God, life is nothing more than a dry, burning desert, but God has showered us with blessings. Of course, the showers are not literal rain, not in the spiritual sense. The showers of blessing from the spiritual world have all come through the life of a person, of Jesus Christ. God blessed us in Christ. God chose us in Christ. God adopted us through Christ. God redeemed and forgave us in Christ. God revealed himself in Christ. We have received an inheritance in Christ. God has showered us with Christ. In the fullness of time, Paul says, God has gathered all things together, things in heaven and things on earth, in Christ.

St. John Chrysostom, a leader of the church from the fourth century, wrote this: “The fullness of time was the Son’s appearing. When…God had done all through angels, through prophets and through the law, yet nothing had improved, there was a danger that humanity had come into being for nothing. It was not going merely nowhere but to the bad. All were perishing together, just like in the days of the flood but more so. Just then he offered this gracious dispensation—to ensure that creation should not have come into being for nothing or in vain. The fullness of time is that divine wisdom by which, at the moment when all were most likely to perish, they were saved.”^iv Or, in the Latin words sung a few moments ago: Pie Jesu, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem: merciful Jesus, who takes away the sins of the world, grant them rest.

God showers us with abundant and eternal life through Jesus Christ. This amazing fact can be true because Jesus is the place where divine and human meet in one glorious reality. “[G]od has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” I suppose that people have wondered from the beginning of time about how we who are of the earth can find a way to get beyond the earth, beyond this level of existence, into the world beyond. Science fiction is always talking about gateways or portals between one time into another, or between one side of the universe to the other. Mosques always have an elaborately decorated doorway on one wall that actually leads to nowhere, but is meant to symbolize the gateway to heaven. And in many biblical visions, a doorway opens in the sky, and on the other side of the doorway is heaven. To the Ephesians Paul says that Jesus himself is the doorway, the junction point, between spiritual and physical, between time and eternity, between heaven and earth, between God and human. And this is the greatest blessing of all. We don’t have to look for the magic gateway to the good life anymore. It is here, among us, in Jesus.

T. S. Eliot wrote, “Except for the point, the still point, there would be no dance, and there is only the dance.” Christ is the point around whom all else centers, around whom all else revolves. Without him there is nothing.

In the mission and message of Jesus Christ heaven has come to earth so that you and I might be blessed with all the resources that exist in the heart of God. If you know Jesus, and not just know about Jesus but also know Jesus himself in that mysterious friendship between your soul and his that is made possible by faith, then you know who you are and why you are here and what life is all about. You are a person who has been made to be blessed and this life is about enjoying that blessing. The very nature of your existence is about being blessed. The very nature of reality itself is about expressing the joyful creativity of God. This is who you are: God’s own child, created to enjoy all the goodness God has created around you.

It is absolutely vital that you and I know who we are because that tells us, then, what we are supposed to do. Early one Sunday morning a mother walked into her son’s bedroom and said, “Son, it’s time to wake up. You have to go to church.” The son grumbled something, and turned around and went back to sleep. So a bit later mom went again into her son’s bedroom and said, “Son, get up. It’s almost time to go to church.” Again, the son just turned around and went back to sleep. Finally the mom became a little exasperated. She came into her son’s room and pulled back the covers and said, “Son, wake up and go to church.” And the son said, “But mom, I don’t feel like going to church this morning!” And mom said, “Son, you are the preacher, you have to go to church!” Who you are says a lot about what you are supposed to do.

Some people believe that there is no particular meaning to their existence or to life itself, and so they are left to their own imaginations when it comes to living well. Sometimes that means that they care nothing about other people, and care only about satisfying their own appetites for as long as they can, because someday they’ll die and the dance will be over, and that’s a very frustrating way to live because no appetite is ever totally satisfied. Some people believe that the meaning of existence has to do with appeasing an angry God, and so they live in constant fear of taking a wrong step and suffering God’s eternal anger. Some people believe that they have a special relationship with God while others do not, and in fact God wants to destroy those who are not in his favor, and so those people who enjoy God’s favor plot and scheme to terrorize and kill the people whom God doesn’t like, which is a very violent way to live. Some people believe that if there is a God he is not necessarily concerned about our lives, and so we are left to our own devices to make of this life what we can, which is a rather lonely way to live. What you believe about yourself and what you believe about the fundamental nature of the world in which you live has a profound impact on the way you live.

If you believe that the Creator has taken the trouble to unite heaven and earth in his Son so that he might shower you and me and all people with lives of joy and purpose, of grace and peace, then how are you going to live when you walk out of this place?

Amen.

ⁱTime Magazine, July 11, 2005, p. 49-50
ⁱⁱFrom Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1997, p. 35 ⁱⁱⁱDaniel Whittle, Showers of Blessing>/i>, 1883.
^ivMark J. Edwards, Ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, Vol. VIII, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, Illinois, 1999, p. 115-116.

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